ABSTRACT
Philopoemen’s drastic and brutal intervention at Sparta in 188 served among other things to restore the political unity of the Peloponnese that Achaea had at last achieved, with grudging Roman acquiescence, in 191. The original incorporation of Sparta in the Achaean League in 192 was described in the previous chapter as the realization of a dream. In the period currently under review the dream turned into, if not a nightmare, at least a persistent headache and sometimes an acute migraine. Fittingly, it was by way of a final paroxysm of enmity between Achaean federalism and the still stubbornly eccentric polis of Sparta that the Achaean League-and so European Greece-was stripped of its remaining tatters of ‘freedom’ by the fiercely conquering imperial might of Rome. This, then, is a sorry tale, a veritable declension, maybe even a nemesis; and it is not improved either by the theoretical preconceptions, ideological predilections and self-exculpating arrière-pensée of our main source, Polybius, or by the truncated condition of the relevant portions of his extant work (scattered through Books xxii-xxxix). Best, therefore, to keep the story as short as decently and comprehensibly possible.1
